For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug made specifically to treat cancer in dogs. The drug, which is made by Pfizer Animal Health, an arm of the giant pharmaceutical company, is called Palladia and is used to treat canine cutaneous mast cell tumors, which account for about one in five cases of skin tumors in dogs.
Although some mast cell tumors can be easily removed through surgery, other cases have been more difficult to treat, and the cancer can spread to other parts of a dog's body. Palladia kills tumor cells and cuts off the tumors' blood supply.
"Prior to this approval, veterinarians had to rely on human oncology drugs, without knowledge of how safe or effective they would be for dogs," Bernadette Dunham, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement. "Today's approval offers dog owners, in consultation with their veterinarian, an option for treatment of their dog's cancer."
In clinical studies, Palladia caused about 60 percent of tumors in dogs to disappear, shrink or stop growing.
Like all drugs, there are side effects, which may include diarrhea, loss of appetite, weight loss and bloody stools.
If your pet is suffering from canine B-cell lymphoma, a common form of cancer in dogs, here's some news that might offer hope: North Carolina State's College of Veterinary Medicine will soon become the first university in the country to offer bone marrow transplants to dogs.
The university recently received three leukophoresis machines donated by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The machines are used with drug therapy to harvest stem cells that have left the patient's bone marrow and entered the bloodstream. Those harvested cancer-free cells are then reintroduced into the patient after total body radiation is used to kill residual cancer left in the body.
The good news is that the procedure is expected to give many dogs a second chance at life. According to Dr. Steven Suter, assistant professor of oncology at the university's College of Veterinary Medicine, the cure rate in dogs is about 0-2 percent with chemotherapy only.
With this procedure, Suter said in an email, "we feel we can improve the cure rate and hope to see close to a 50-percent cure rate."
The cost isn't cheap - about $15,000, including a priming procedure before the transplant and a two-week hospital stay afterward - but Suter said he's hoping to find donors who will help outfit the school's cancer unit and defray some of the cost to clients. He plans to treat one dog per month for the first year; if demand it high, he said, he can offer two transplants a month.
If you think your pet might be a candidate for this type of procedure, you can reach Suter through the school's Web site. But Suter said he would need to speak to a referring veterinarian and see a dog's medical records before considering treatment.
Since dogs were used during research and testing before the procedure was used on humans, it's good to know that they will soon benefit from the same technology.
"Virtually all human bone marrow transplant protocols were first developed and tested in dogs in a research setting," Suter said, "therefore canine bone marrow transplants have been going on for close to 20-25 years in a research setting. This is a fantastic opportunity to give back to dogs a technology that they had a huge hand (or paw) in developing."
